Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Sept. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer John Mack, who struggled to return the bank to profitability amid the financial crisis, said a single regulator should oversee financial institutions worldwide.

“A better system would be one uber-regulator,” Mack said in an interview in New York for Bloomberg Television’s “Conversations with Judy Woodruff,” parts of which will air today. “We do need an overall systemic-risk management that everyone buys into. It’s not a U.S. systemic boundary -- it’s a global systemic risk manager.”

But, but, but... I thought regulation was anathema to these greedy capitalist pigs - not to mention "uber-regulation" on a global scale. Sorry, but the real world isn't as simple as a Micheal Moore movie. Why do big firms push for regulation? To drive up costs to competitors, capture friendly regulators, placate populist indignation, create barriers to entry, incrementally build a global system that can circumvent economic nationalism and set up oligopolies in new markets like carbon credit trading, just to name a few...

Large banks have always been international in nature and have sought regulation to protect their government subsidized monopolies...